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Two points away from reaching the women’s 10m air rifle final, Bahya Mansour Al Hamad still made history by becoming the first female Olympian of Qatar. The 20-year-old, dressed in headscarf, who …Go to Source

I envy the next generation of historians the growing wealth of digital source material. For centuries historians have had to go where the archives were, but we may finally be about to transcend that.

It’s interesting that, in the article, an archivist (if quoted correctly by the newspaper) actually compares this immense undertaking to the accomplishment of J.G. Lorimer in compiling his great 5000=page Gazeteer of the Gulf, which I’ve discussed on this blog before. That may understate the goals of this huge project, but it does indicate an appreciation of the immensity of the contribution of John Gordon Lorimer to the history of the Gulf.

Engaging the Muslim World, revised Paperback October, 2010– has a chapter on the Muslim Brotherhood and the radical Muslim movements in Egypt as well as chapters on countries likely to be affected by the Egypt events such as Saudi Arabia.

One of the city-states founded by Yemeni Hadhrami Arabs was Lamu, an island off the present Kenyan coast, a world heritage site

Throughout its history Yemen has been a seafaring nation, famed for boat building and its mariners navigation skills. While the Yemeni sailors harnessed the monsoon winds to reach distant ports, inland its farmers harnessed water to develop life-sustaining agriculture adopting to a harsh and often formidable environment.

Archaeologists are still investigating these long gone civilizations that have played a major role in transforming global history. These ancient civilizations introduced deep-sea sailing vessels capable of long distance travel and trade. At this time writing, banking, shareholding were established and developed societies were formed for perhaps the first time over.

Linen, cotton, wool and metal were taken to China, where cargoes of silk, camphor, musk, spice were exchanged and Yemen acquired ceramics. Southern Arabia was on cross roads on the trade routes between China and India to the East, and the Red Sea and East Africa to the southwest providing merchants with a huge and lucrative markets. One of the city-states founded by Yemeni Hadhrami Arab travelers was located on the island just off the northern coast of present day Kenya called Lamu.

It has become increasingly apparent that politics and business often attract psychopaths, because of the opportunities they offer for the gratification of narcissism, grandiosity, sadism and other severe pathologies.

For psychopaths, really on an Anders Breivik pre-massacre level, no one takes the cake in American politics more than Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota’s 6th District.

“In spite of ”long years of repression by the regime,” the movement has remained strong in Syria, said Brotherhood leader, Mohammad Riad Shakfa. The biggest force on the Syrian National Council, which is the West’s main opposition interlocutor, and very influential in the Syrian Free Army…

So Bachmann is actually herself a strong ally of the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria.

3. Bachmann is a supporter of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and tried to visit with them.. The Northern Alliance was a coalition of forces fighting the Taliban. It consisted in part of the Jami’at-i Islami, to which many of its prominent members belonged. The Jami’at-i Islami is the AFghanistan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Egyptian missionaries in the 1960s. Another component of the Northern Alliance was the Shiite Hizb-i Vahdat or Unity Party, which was allied with Iran in the 1990s.

So Bachmann is, once again, closely connected with the Muslim Brotherhood via the Afghanistan Northern Alliance.

4. In fall of 2011 as the US was preparing to withdraw from Iraq, Michele Bachmann opposed the troop withdrawal. She said that the US was being kicked out of Iraq because the Shiite government of PM Nouri al-Maliki was under the thumb of Iran, and taking orders from it.

Iraq’s disgraced former vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, also accused Tehran of orchestrating the launches of charges against him of being involved in terrorism. Bachmann is therefore an ally of Hashemi, since they have the same analysis and resentments toward Iran’s role in Iraqi politics, and they oppose that role together. Hashemi was for a long time a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by an Egyptian missionary in 1934 in Mosul.

In all seriousness, the Muslim Brotherhood is not a centralized party. It has its own history in each country where it exists, and the leaderships don’t coordinate. The largest MB party is in Egypt, and it is not only not a terrorist group, it is behind the Freedom and Justice Party, which got 46 percent of the seats in the parliament and won the presidency. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood made a commitment to non-violence and to civil politics in the 1970s and is not a terrorist organization.

Still, it is very suspicious the way it has managed to recruit a Minnesota congresswoman to its cause.

Although Alexander is characterised by the Persians as a destroyer, a reckless and somewhat feckless youth, the evidence suggests that he retained a healthy respect for the Persians themselves.
Alexander came to regret the destruction his invasion caused. Coming across the plundered tomb of Cyrus the Great in Pasargad, a little north of Persepolis, he was much distressed by what he found and immediately ordered repairs to be made.
Had he lived beyond his 32 years, he may yet have restored and repaired much more. In time, the Persians were to come to terms with their Macedonian conqueror, absorbing him, as other conquerors after him, into the fabric of national history.
And thus it is that in the great Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh, written in the 10th Century AD, Alexander is no longer a wholly foreign prince but one born of a Persian father.
It is a myth, but one that perhaps betrays more truth than the appearance of history may like to reveal.

“… Victoria Toensing of DiGenova & Toensing, a lobbying shop famous for its involvement in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, was paid $110,000 in 2011 to lobby for the resolution. The firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld dedicated five lobbyists to getting signatures for the resolution, and was paid $100,000 in 2012 and $290,000 in 2011 to do so. Paul Marcone and Association similarly lobbied for the resolution, and received $5,000 in 2010 and $5,000 in 2011 for its efforts.
“It’s a worthy cause,” said Toensing, who believes the M.E.K. has reformed from its violent past. “Have you ever seen a more bipartisan disciplined group as the one that supported this issue?”…”